Finnegans Wake: The Dictionary in the Head

This is the first systematic attempt ever to put together and begin to coordinate the research done over many years on the languages in Finnegans Wake.

The idea behind the whole series of Lexicons is based on the possible concept of a Dictionary in the Head for a number of languages, parallelling N. Chomsky's Linguistic Intuition.

After the volumes devoted to Romanian, German, and Scandinavian languages, the present volume brackets together a bunch of more than twenty languages, ranging from French to all the Slavonic ones. The Introduction gives a few clues about how to read a book which is written in more than one single language. Finnegans Wake is suited to such an approach, as it evinces many similarities with Tristan Tzara’s kind of collage. In addition, Joyce was as obsessive in his literary preoccupations as Brancusi himself was with his relatively few images. The main feature of this book, and of the volumes in the same series, is that it brings increased Precision to literary studies, particularly when they focus on the texts of great difficulty. There is also far greater attention paid to the rhetorical implications which inevitably arise from the simultaneous use of a multiplicity of languages.

This Volume Five in the series thus becomes its very centrepiece and, as such, it is dedicated to James Joyce’s grandson, Stephen, whose 80th birthday we have just celebrated in mid-February. Everybody knows these days how attached the author James Joyce was to his whole family, circumstantial proof thereof being the two short fairy-tales exclusively written for his grandson. The series is not yet complete: there are other volumes that will follow, not only about the Romance languages, but also about English itself.